An Interview with Philip Metres: Part II

This is the second part of an interview with Philip Metres. The first part of the interview can be found here.

Anthony Shoplik: I want to ask you more about the place of literature in all of this. You write in The Sound of Listening about poetry as both refuge and resistance. I wonder if you could historicize your account of what poetry is or does. Is this a distinctively modern account of poetry that responds to the specific conditions of modernity (however we might define that term) or has it ever been so: does poetry serve the same purposes as 50, 100, 500 years ago? Has social media changed poetry? Will AI change poetry?

Philip Metres: I was just emailed by someone who shares an interest in the nexus between poetry and magic, which would be way more fun to talk about! But maybe it’s best to set these two conversations in dialogue--that the claims of modernity and the extent of our belief in Western progress, science, the individual, democracy, etc.—have come into crisis in such a thoroughgoing way that many of us have gone back to seeking lost pathways, the ones visible in indigenous practices and in the undersides of erased or suppressed texts (to wit, the destruction by patriarchal monotheisms of pantheistic, pagan, and other ritual practices that often privileged female goddesses). It occurs to me that the origins of modernity as a concept coincided with the rise of colonialism and Western empire. If I understand Bruno LaTour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern, one of the original divides that constitutes modern thinking is the one between nature and culture, the idea that we were separate from (and superior to) the earth. It’s Western philosophy’s subject-object split. The ideological engine of colonialism and empire required a kind of categorical divide between the slavers and those enslaved—as if between those who were cultured and those who were barbarous, wild, of nature. Does that mean that modernity is merely an alibi for an imperial ideology that led to the brutal international slave trade? No, because that sort of thinking also existed before Western empire, and modern thinkers also questioned this very sorting mechanism. But it does mean that the idyll of modernity has been more of a horizon than an achieved condition. So the lazy part of me thinks, to hell with modernity and its purported superiority to older ways of being and thinking.

But take a more recent example. I could not imagine a world without science, and yet scientism is also fraught. Consider the COVID-19 pandemic. It is quite possible that the pandemic was caused by a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan funded by the U.S. government to produce bioweapons (an idea that the U.S. government has actively suppressed). Among the U.S. public health’s first communications was to tell us that face masks were not effective—which was an outright lie circulated because the CDC feared that there would be a run on masks and healthcare professionals would not be able to be adequately protected. This lie, and the concomitant politicization of mask-wearing, and the disinformation campaigns that now circulate across the world, dealt an almost fatal blow to one of the simplest and oldest forms of protection against airborne viruses. 

I see people (including friends and family) who embrace, willy-nilly, things like Ivermectin as a cure for Covid, or one hundred other wild theories that have no basis in scientific evidence. Our “post-fact” society means that the very foundations of democracy are threatened. We’re vulnerable to autocracy and fascism. 

So where does poetry fit into this moment, yet another moment of uneven modernity, on the cusp of an AI revolution, a climate collapse, and a pandemic that’s supposed to be over but really only appears to be over? Poetry is one of the oldest forms of art in the world, and exists in every culture in the world. It’s the closest thing—alongside music and dance and visual art—to a transhistorical technology of human expression and contemplation. I think of poetry as a technology of the imagination and of the human voice. If we understand poetry in its broadest sense—as language (rather than text) that tends toward the lyrical and the symbolic, then maybe it hasn’t really changed in 500 or even 1000 years. The reasons for and means of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Rumi’s ghazals, or Bashō’s haiku seem very legible to us. Even going back to the ancient Greeks (2500 years ago), or the Hebrews (3000-3500 years ago), or even to the first known poet, Enheduanna—we can sense a shared human feeling. We can see the notion of poetry as refuge, or as lament of exile, from the very beginning. If in my first critical book, Behind the Lines, I explored the complex interactions between poets and the peace movement in the United States, then The Sound of Listening was my attempt to go back to some of poetry’s roots that are deeper than resistance, per se. Of course, poets’ relationship with power has been vexatious and often challenging throughout recorded history—think of Hebrew prophets, or the Oracle of Delphi.  

At the same time, we can talk about documentary/investigative poetics—a largely modern and even postmodern phenomenon, or erasure poetry, new visual poetries, hell, even Insta-poetry (and I’m sure TikTok poetry)—all of these modes are influenced by technologies of composition and publication that have opened up new forms of expression and new expression of forms, and I imagine AI will be part of that new way that we conceive of the genre and authorship (already, for some time now, people have been using algorithms to generate poetry, so this is a mere step, not a quantum leap). Social media has been a boon to poetry because of its concision and its affect-effect—you can find people sharing short poems, or quotes from poems, all the time, as gestures of the sharer’s mood or aesthetic. In general, this is good for the art, and has led to a more diverse host of poets who have gained broad audiences without the usual gatekeeping mechanisms of academia and publishers.

Poetry still seems virtually non-commodifiable—in other words, there is no real, substantial capitalist demand for it. Or rather, supply of poetry vastly outpaces demand. (Obviously, there are a few poets who make bank, but mostly when they work as “poets” more than when they “sell” their poems, per se.) While poetry has some cultural capital, it remains stubbornly marginal to the real economy, asserting its freedom from the coin and realm. There’s something either embarrassingly quaint or truly lovely about this. Of course, AI could potentially squeeze out the only blood from poetry’s comically dry turnip. But mostly I think poets are afraid of losing what it means to be human, if AI begins to master affect. To the doomsayers, I would say, we’ve weathered this before. We will weather this storm as well. How we will weather the climate crisis is another question entirely.

AS: Thank you for this incredibly generous and multifaceted response! It’s tempting to leave it there, at the disjunction between poetry as a transhistorical technology of human expression (and your sense that, over the centuries, artists have endured and even embraced changes in technology) and the anthropocene as an utterly different kind of event. But in the spirit of your observation that art is a refuge, I’m wondering if we can close with you saying a bit about where you’re finding refuge these days. Are there particular authors or artworks you find yourself gravitating to lately? I’d also love to hear about your travels to the Vatican earlier this year. It must have been quite something to receive an invitation from the Pope to come to Rome.

Vincent Van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night (1888)

PM: Well, I’m in the south of France for a few days, and today I spent walking in the footsteps of Van Gogh in Arles. His two years in Arles were his most electrifyingly productive years, producing 200 paintings and 100 drawings. I loved seeing with my own eyes the plane trees and the cypresses, which I think of as his trees! One of the things that struck me again about many of his paintings is that they often take an angle or focus on something that we might not immediately see as beautiful or even worthy of art. The only painting he did of the ancient Roman arena (the biggest outside of Rome’s Colosseum) doesn't even feature the grand architecture or the bullfight in the ring, but the scuffle and seethe of the crowd. At home before bed, I occasionally read his letters (an old musty copy of Dear Theo). He had such suffering, but he saw his painting in spiritual terms. In one letter, he writes, “...in a painting I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting—I want to paint man and workmen with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibrations of our coloring.” If you haven’t seen the film At Eternity’s Gate, let me be the first to recommend it to you!

Others that would make my short list of “refuge” works, at least for the moment: stories of Anton Chekhov; the music of Bon Iver, Sinead O’Connor, and Jason Isbell; the Psalms; the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. But I would say, having just visited Pope Francis and hearing his address to our delegation of international Catholic writers, I would stake a claim also for literature that wounds us awake as well, literature that resists complacency. The world, after all, is a broken place, but we must not flee it. Or in Pope Francis’s words, “Literature is like a thorn in the heart; it moves us to contemplation and sets us on a journey.” We need art that does both, depending on our condition—scourge and balm, challenge and encouragement. In my next book of poems, Fugitive/Refuge (2024), I find myself restlessly moving between these modes—trying to create a space of welcome and awakening for the weary (Isaiah: “that I might speak to the weary a word that will rouse them”), and one of prophetic challenge, the sting of conscience, for when we fall asleep in our privilege.

Anthony Shoplik is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Loyola University Chicago. His current research explores the confluence of U.S. environmentalism and conservationism with American accounts of national and racial identity.

Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020). Winner of Guggenheim, Lannan, and NEA fellowships, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and core faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA.